Sasa

Uri Berger and Michael Peleg

15/04/2019

Final Report

In June 2017, after a two-year lapse, a trial excavation was renewed on the summit of Tel Sasa (Permit No. A-7450; map ref. 23710/770450) with the resumption of development work at the site. The excavation, undertaken on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and financed by Kibbutz Sasa, was directed by A. Berger and M. Peleg (photography, surveying and digital and photogrammetric documentation), with the assistance of E. Hillman (administration), R. Liran (surveying and drafting) and A. Shapiro (GPS and mapping). The dating of modern finds was also assisted by members of Kibbutz Sasa, among them D. Raziel and R. Rashakas, who have amassed information about the site since the kibbutz’s establishment.

The excavation was the continuation of a small trial excavation that began in 2015 (Berger 2017) and was halted at the request of the commissioning and financing entity. The excavation focused on a rock-hewn burial cave (Figs. 1–3) several dozen meters west of the previous excavation site, in an area where work was being carried out to replace a modern retaining wall on the northwest slopes of the hill where Tel Sasa lies.

The cave was discovered after the removal of a modern wall built during the 1970s that had blocked its entrance and that was devoid of any finds. It apparently served for some time as a favorite meeting place for the young people of the kibbutz in the late 1950s. They decorated the walls with colored graffiti (Figs. 4, 5) before the cave was sealed up and forgotten (Rachewsky 2018; Reshkes 2018; members of Kibbutz Sasa, pers. comm.). In the years since it was sealed, the cave has suffered from lack of drainage. Heavy rains have compounded the bad preservation of the sediment in its floor and appear to have washed away any meager finds that may have existed there. The west part of the cave, which contained the original entrance and some of its loculi, had been damaged and destroyed by quarrying in the past, probably while constructing buildings for the kibbutz in the 1950s and 1960s. According to the testimonies of the kibbutz members, the cave contained no finds when the kibbutz was established and its entrance had been breached even before the modern construction work commenced.

The cave has a main chamber (3.3 × 3.3 m, 1.1–1.2 m high) and 12 loculi (c. 0.6 m wide, c. 1 m high, c. 1.9 m long). The loculi appear to have been hewn to a certain standard and their dimensions were generally similar. Two double-width cells (c. 1.2 m) that led through an arched opening to inner loculi were found in the southeast corner of the chamber.

Underground cavities and burial caves are known at Kibbutz Sasa. Three of these caves were excavated in the past and yielded relatively rich archaeological finds, which enabled them to be dated to the Roman period and attributed to the Jewish settlement that was located there until the Byzantine period (Davis and Zias 1975; Syon and Nagar 2014), after which they were used until the Mamluk and Ottoman periods (Permit No. A-6658). The currently excavated burial cave adds further detail to the map of Jewish burial sites around the site and increases our understanding of the ancient underground features used by Sasa’s inhabitants in former times (Fig. 6).